Editors from VICE Magazine explain why the October issue explores the theme of Power and Privilege.

This year we set out to cover what it means to be young in 2018. In April we released our Dystopia and Utopia Issue, in which we investigated whether we should be terrified or optimistic about the future. In June it was the Privacy and Perception Issue, which looked at the intersections of sexuality, intimacy, privacy, and gender and how that all plays out online in complicated ways. And now we’re pleased to release our third quarterly edition of the year: the Power and Privilege Issue.

In putting this issue together we took a cue from the VICE Voices survey we conducted in the US and UK at the start of 2018. The survey asked thousands of young people what they think about the future—what issues are important and what’s at stake. There were three key findings we wanted to delve into: Millennials and Gen Z don’t feel that their education is preparing them for the future and are worried they won’t be able to get jobs and be financially secure, but they still believe in action and the power to make change happen. We homed in on these feelings and perspectives to help shape the content, format, and design of the issue.

The issue’s design and aesthetic was inspired by stress: the stress young adults face while trying to make sense of the world and constantly having to fill out a never-ending stream of forms, which can feel cumbersome and pointless. So we mimicked formal structures of future planning—taking tests and completing forms—to convey a degree of alienation and uncertainty, and employed deconstructed forms, multiple-choice boxes, pencil marks, scratches, and machine type. We also use repetition as an oppressive graphical nod to the monotonous tasks we do in life, combined with a sense of data overload to evoke the frustration of having to parse through so much information to find the real meaning.